INTRODUCTION & DISCLAIMER

I find this discussion very interesting and wanted to share it with you and make it available to the wider European community. Although the speakers do at times appear to veer slightly off topic, a lot of what is said is good food for thought. I have transcribed some of the interview below – selecting parts I think will be most relevant and interesting for the readers of this blog – and have also paraphrased some of what was said to make it more succinct (and to make it easier for our wonderful translators!). I sincerely hope that I have not lost the essence of what was said while paraphrasing.

Please be aware that these are other people’s’ opinions and mine may differ, however I have made a conscious decision not to put my interpretation on it so that you can come to your own conclusions.

Any notes in italics are my words, added as a side note or to give context.

Jonathan Janis: Interviewer

Richard Powers: Dance historian at Stanford University and teaches about social dances worldwide.

Opening question: How is the past alive and communicated in social vernacular idiomatic dances?

Richard: In blues a lot of it begins with the music. I think that’s the bridge for many people from the past…

Brenda: It used to be passed down from body to body, but in the modern culture that’s changed. The young people are picking up the music from the past and trying to figure out how to move to it…

Damon: The idea of people discovering that the dance exists not through the love of the music is very foreign to me. A friend of mine posted a question on Facebook “Did you always love the music that goes with the dance that you do?” and I was shocked by the question itself! The idea the you would do a dance when you didn’t love the music from day one just seems so foreign to me… I grew up listening to all of the music that goes with the dance that I do… the idea that this music moves me internally and then not expressing that externally seems like such a weird disconnect to me.

Brenda: In the culture now you have people coming to dance because they’re lacking touch, socialisation and sensuality in their lives. I ask them “what music do you like?” and also tell them they need to consider the ambience of the venues and the people who are there. These three things will determine what social dances they’re going to do and if they connect with the community…

Discussing the way people learn to dance…

Brenda: The way people learn is a problem for learning dance. A lot of my students are academics and they think they’re going to learn dance the same way that they learn maths and it just doesn’t work that way!

I try to dance in my community. Not everyone is living that way. Here, in our local sub-culture blues community, there are people who come from all around town or from towns an hour or two hours away and they dance in this ballroom and they get this idea that somehow this is it. This is what blues dancing is. But you can just walk out your door and go and see the mainstream live blues music that’s happening every day in dozens and dozens of bars all around town. There’s this whole life happening here in the city that these people don’t know anything about. That’s the part that’s really bizarre to me. You can have a local culture and a local community but people don’t choose to.

Damon: I don’t mean this in a specifically negative way, but there’s a definite sense of entitlement and expectation of things being catered ‘to me’. People think “Here’s this thing that I really like. I like it in a specific way and if I can’t find it I’ll go onto the internet and see if there’s anybody else in my town who thinks the way I do”.
For example: you really like a particular kind of music. You find other people who like the same music and together you rent a space, play the music and dance to it; however there are probably bands playing the music you love in your city, not too far from you, and if you just voyage out and explore you could find what you’re looking for and find a larger community. But instead people think “I want my thing, my way, when I want it” and end up creating a scene right next door to a vibrant community that they just never explored. I see this in blues all the time.

In blues for example, events bring in musicians from afar for their events. But why aren’t you getting blues musicians in your town to play? It’s one thing if you have 12 people in your town, but if you live in a decent size town you have blues bands… (adding a note here to say this may not be true outside of the USA, but still worth looking…).

Brenda: In every country I go to people are dancing in these little ballrooms and I’m trying to show them how to do different movements and teach them about the music. Then I go to 5 different bars and dance and tell them “you have a great blues music scene!” If you would go and dance to it, you would actually learn the movements from the musicians in the way that it’s traditionally learned. You listen to the music, your body responds, and the movements will develop more naturally. Rather than you trying to recreate it in this hall you rented, listening to recorded music (that isn’t even necessarily blues), picking up some moves from Youtube.” It’s a case of “I want to do it this exact way, but I want to call it this cultural dance”.

Discussing the importance of cultural and historic knowledge of a dance…

Brenda: People who are trying to do the dances without this knowledge are not able to accomplish them. I can’t think of an example of somebody who is really accurately doing a dance without understanding the culture. Even in some places like Korea, it looks like a caricature, it looks like they’re acting, or making fun of it. There is a lack of real authenticity. From a movement education perspective, they are able to identify the movement elements and mimic them, but they aren’t able to mimic the spirit and the energy and the feeling with which the dances are done.

Jonathan: You’re saying that the spirit, energy and feeling informs or defines the physical movements?

Brenda: Exactly!

Damon: I would say define, not just inform.

Damon: [I’m very much paraphrasing here] The physicality of a dance or dance genre is attached directly to the music. If you take a clip or a still image of any dance (Tango, Waltz, Blues etc) you can see a clear shape that identifies the dance. That shape is based on the aesthetic and depends on where the dance has come from. Cultural transmission means that the dance evolves and changes all the time. If you’re not part of that culture and you don’t understand the cultural values that shape artistic decisions, you end up mimicking a thing and looking like a caricature. For example, if I take still images of Frankie Manning I will have an idea of what Lindy Hop should look like. I can make my body do those same shapes, but how I transition between those shapes, and how I move within those shapes is different.

Brenda: That’s what we call ‘critical timing’ in competition judging – how we move in between. We get a lot of people coming and dancing in blues competitions and we say “it’s not quite blues, because your critical timing doesn’t express the dance in between the shapes you made, all you did was accent and pose. You didn’t actually dance the dance.”

One thing I’ve noticed is that people around the world in the ‘blues’ sub-culture are doing a lot of re-enactment.

I’m dancing 6 nights a week in blues bars, and often dance in blues bars all across the world. That worldwide mainstream blues culture is very well connected and the music is similarly progressing. I continue to teach and inform other people from that place, but then I go into communities and I start to show a thing and someone says “that’s not blues”.

Richard: Or you could teach something, then go back to the same community a year later and they say it’s wrong because they’ve taken one bit of what you taught and formalised it, and compartmentalised it into one thing that gets narrower and narrower.

Richard [Talking of a group of dancers he knows who dance the Mazurka]: They also dance Salsa, they dance Tango, they’re not consciously trying to mimic or anything. If you know 3 dance forms you put them together and it’s like being you, and not trying to pretend to be a style… it felt like an innocent ‘being yourself’ as opposed to trying to be something else.

Brenda: …Why can’t you just do the thing you’re doing, appreciate it and enjoy it? I see a lot of these online arguments. We’re arguing about language online and it would be simple if people just embraced what they’re doing, really felt proud of it, give it a name or don’t. But why do people have to try to create value with it by taking other names? I’ll point it out to people when I go to Europe. I’ll say “what you’re doing is not blues” and that’s not a criticism. When I say “that’s not blues” it is no way a criticism, what you’re doing is beautiful, you’re a beautiful dancer…

Damon: Stop trying to make blues, or any specific dance, be the thing you want it to be. If you like what you do, and you do it moderately well, other people are going to see it and they’re also going to like it and you’re going to create your own dance style. And if you do what you do really well, you will absolutely create your own dance style. Stop trying to co-opt or appropriate or associate the thing that you do with this other thing if it’s outside of that. Be proud of your accomplishments and stand up and say “this is what I do, this is {insert your name here} style. I’ll teach it to you if you think it’s cool too!”

If I do different dances and a song comes on, I’m going to do the things that feel good and make sense to the music. I’m not going to worry about whether what I’m doing is technically Salsa, or technically Tango, or technically Mazurka. I’m just going to dance the way my body knows how to move to music. That’s what we call dancing! Literally that is how all these things got started. It’s what all the originators and innovators of all these historically founded dances did.

Frankie Manning talks about how the bands, Basie and Ellington and Goodman and the other big kings of Swing, all played Waltzes and foxtrots as well as Swing songs. They also played Barrelhouse blues. They were dance bands, if they couldn’t play what the dances wanted to hear they didn’t eat that week and their tour would collapse…. The idea that ‘combining’ different dances is new is naive. Combining things is just a very human reaction to knowledge – if I’ve studied maths and science and art, they are going to inform each other. The idea of compartmentalising and creating these arbitrary divisions is weird to me.

Jonathan finishes up the interview by asking:

What do you see is the role of a modern educator? What do you think is important as you (the educators) and these dance communities move forward?

Brenda: That’s why I’ve chosen movement education as opposed to focussing on sub-culture dances. I’m focussed on movement based lifestyle and sensual living because I believe that a huge percentage of the people coming in are looking for touch; they are looking for community; they’re looking for belonging. Those reasons in a lot of the big cities that I teach in are overriding what dance it is… if I can show people how to connect with their own body and how to connect with each other they can choose any music that they want to, any venue that they want to, any people they want to and they’ll be able to do that creation of their own style. They might be authentically creating something that existed before because they really listened to the music and it moved them in the same way… Once people can connect with their body, learn how to hear the music, let it hit them, move how they want to move, connect with other people, then we don’t need to worry about what it is, what it’s called, what’s right, what’s wrong. We get to what we all really want which is to connect and feel that we belong.

Damon: What I’m trying to do is keep the spirit and style of the dancing that I learned from people who are mostly not with us anymore, alive. I don’t want it to be a recreation of this exact dance as I learnt it from my Great Aunt Mary, but I’m going to teach the structure that these people taught me. I hope it won’t be a recreation, but part of a living tradition. I want people to use this knowledge as a base from which they will develop things based on their own dance background and movement styles, and carry it forward. I try to explain that there are innumerable ways of doing a dance right, there are a few ways of very clearly doing a dance wrong. But doing a dance wrong doesn’t mean that you’re dancing poorly, it’s just not that dance… If I stay true to the foundational elements of a dance I can grow it and change it and add things in all sorts of ways. When I choose to depart from those foundational elements, I’m making that choice and I’m creating something new. And that keeps the tradition of dancing alive.